I've always wanted to fly - poetry

FLY

WHEN I was younger I was convinced that I could fly. I could feel it in my arms, in my chest, in my legs and in my heart. The feeling of flight was similar in my bones. When I asked my mother about it, she told me about my brain. She told me that it was full of ideas. And that sometimes, people's imaginations could be so big that it caused them pain and worry. She told me that was why my nightmares were so scary. Because my brain was good at making things up. I liked my brain. So much, that I then decided to spend the rest of my life confined in it. In school, I would imagine I was a princess, compelled to work in a horrible boarding school. On car drives home, I would pretend I was a girl in a film, on her way to a new beginning. When my parents would argue, I would pretend to be a character from a book, forced to live among argumentative divorcees who kept me locked away in my room. On walks in the woods, I would stay inside my head, and picture my past lives that I spent as a forest fairy. And it was nice, to have something to shelter me from the world I was not yet brave enough to face.

I WILL admit that I sometimes, retreat back to my old habits. Almost every night after I turn out the lights, i climb into my mind and indulge into my thoughts, creating stories or directing film scenes, planning out my life or even just the next day. It's somewhat humorous how much i rely on my brain, seeing as it has caused me a lot of trouble in the past. I spend so much time making things up that sometimes it's very difficult to know what is real. Sometimed my mind comes up with thoughts that terrified me. Thoughts that repulse me, thoughts that I know in my heart aren't my own. And sometimes if i have been living outside my brain for too long, it pulls me back in. Everything goes blurry and I begin to question all the things I had done without thinking. My brain tends to do this at the very worst times. Just before an English exam. In the middle of a conversation with someone I love dearly, and who I desperately want to give my full attention to. When I'm watching a film in another language and need to focus on the subtitles. When I'm reading an intriguing chapter in a book

BUT it's not too hard to forget about those hardships. As I've grown older, I have lost friends, and haven't made many new ones. I have changed clothes. I have cut my hair, and grown it out. I have listened to new music, and read differents books. I have formed new opinions, but my mind is still my mind. I've always had this one, and I'll never get another. I'm stuck. And I could make a list of excuses to why that's ok, how I'll get through it, how I can accept it. But it hurts. It hurts to think that maybe I could've been given a different mind. One that didn't worry so much. One that knew things. One without lingering traces of someone else's past. One that wouldn't ever be naive enough to think that it could fly.